The context of the three-quarters of our continent that is
desert Australia leads to some important implications. Desert
Australia needs to grow to encourage self-reliant regional economic
development and reduce its long-term call on the public purse. It
needs to attract and retain people who can sustain the
region’s services and create wealth. It competes with growing
coastal regions for resources and the attention of politicians and
bureaucrats. Sustainable health and education services in desert
Australia, for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike, depend
on wealth creation and its equitable distribution across the
population.
Desert Knowledge faces a clear philosophical decision: should we
pursue knowledge related to a predominantly welfare-driven economy,
or should we rather develop ideas that might flow from transforming
it into an environment with greater private investment and
individual enterprise, albeit one based on natural and cultural
values? Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in desert Australia
seek to build livelihoods in places that they can afford and which
provide them with access to a desirable range of services. They are
looking for networks of settlements, regional services and small
businesses across desert Australia that provide security.
Their aspirations will be compatible with national priorities if
the benefit of people living in desert Australia exceeds the costs,
especially if the net benefits steadily increase. The definition of
costs and benefits requires close attention, but the Desert
Knowledge movement supports this reality. This creates clear
strategic research requirements for DKCRC. The next section deals
with the underlying logic of these requirements, followed by some
detail on the resulting Core Projects.
Outcome 1: Sustainable livelihoods for desert
people
Long distances to market and high transport costs dictate the
production of two kinds of goods and services: those that deliver a
high return per unit cost of transport (high value) and those that
can only be obtained from desert Australia (place-based). Art works
and knowledge about deserts are examples of high value products
that are cheap to transport compared to their value. Uluru, living
Aboriginal culture and wide open spaces are examples of place-based
products. Even place-based products must be delivered at a price
which matches their perceived value – for example, tourists
must feel their experience warrants the cost of flying in. Such
products should also be strongly value-adding to retain economic
benefits locally, as with bush foods which are processed locally,
and must be delivered as cost-effectively as possible. The local
costs of any desert product are relatively high because the cost of
labour and other inputs are more expensive in remote areas, even in
larger centres such as Alice Springs. We therefore have to be wise
in valuing the capability of local residents to deliver this
labour. This is all very relevant to the challenge of Indigenous
unemployment in desert Australia, but here there are specific
capacity-building and motivation issues that must be addressed as
well.
Among many other related factors, the following best explain
DKCRC’s livelihoods focus:
- The most compelling competitive advantages of desert regions
are to be found in their place-based natural and cultural
resources, and knowledge about these.
- We must understand how to manage these resources most
efficiently and effectively while at the same time creating new and
diversified livelihood opportunities based on them for Indigenous
and non-Indigenous people in remote settlements; this includes a
number of significant institutional design, governance and skills
issues.
- We must explore how to add value to major business
opportunities by increasing the value, and therefore long-term
profitability, of their products.
- We must support the wide range of smaller desert business
opportunities, which individually do not warrant targeted research,
to deal with these issues in a more generic way.
This leads to three Core Projects (CPs). One targets the
understanding of livelihoods in remote locations, whilst the other
two address actual business opportunities, both for major
industries warranting their own focus, and for more general small
business:
CP1: Benefiting Australia through livelihoods from desert resources
aims to understand how to value and capture the value of managing
public goods, such as natural and cultural heritage, including the
appropriate institutional arrangements. This project maximises
national benefits by targeting better investment in remote
areas.
CP2: Key industry opportunities in remote areas aims to lift remote
area industries, in particular bush products, 4WD self-drive remote
tourism and smarter pastoralism3.
CP3: Supporting the emergence of small business in desert Australia
aims to understand and overcome the constraints on remote
businesses and to make small businesses more resilient, profitable
and able to engage with the wider economy, with an emphasis on
Indigenous involvement.
(Note: some additional livelihood opportunities emerge from work in
CP4 and CP5, and from an understanding of regional financial flows
in CP6).
Outcome 2: Viable remote desert settlements,
particularly remote Indigenous communities
Services in desert Australia are fragmented across state borders
and sectors. This increases the cost of living in the desert even
further. Because service delivery to desert Australia is a low
priority for most service delivery agencies, they impose models
that suit areas with denser population. As a result services are
driven by supply rather than demand. For example, housing must meet
east coast standards rather than local community needs, education
prepares for life in cities, not remote communities, etc. Although
there are exceptions, this ‘deficit’ approach to
‘service need’ is pervasive. Instead of people living
in remote areas being able to balance lifestyle priorities and
demand for services openly, they must accept expensive, yet often
ineffective service delivery.
One major consequence is intensifying political debate about the
costs and consequences of services in remote settlements, aimed
mainly at Indigenous communities, but actually just as applicable
to mining, tourism and pastoral remote settlements, as well as
larger services centres such as Broken Hill and Alice Springs. This
debate lacks balanced data on the costs and benefits of these
settlements. It also ignores significant technological
opportunities that could improve the match of services with demand
in desert settlements, lowering costs, increasing benefits,
reducing public expense and creating additional desert livelihood
opportunities.
These issues inform Desert Knowledge CRC’s settlements
work:
- We must understand what factors determine the viability of
remote settlements of differing size, remoteness and social
characteristics.
- We must find out which forms of governance and institutional
structure most clearly express demand in these settlements, thereby
reducing demand for inappropriate services
- We must explore which technical options make those services for
which there is demand most cost-effective
- We must identify business solutions that help communities to
use these services and that may in themselves create additional
jobs in communities
This leads to a further two Core Projects, one to understand
what makes settlements viable, and the other to seek technical and
social solutions for better service delivery in the future. These
projects will consider settlements from very remote and small to
service centres like Kalgoorlie and Alice Springs, but most
attention will be paid to Indigenous settlements: Household
livelihoodsSettlement/ communityRegion (with settlement-scale
resolution)‘Desert’ Australia (with regional
resolution)
CP4: What makes desert settlements viable4? aims to help
communities to understand what would make their settlement more
viable and to inform the debate about the viability of remote
settlements. The pre-conditions for a sustainable remote community
include the institutional and governance frameworks that most
clearly express demand for services.
CP5: Demand-responsive access to services for settlements aims to
improve access to better services and reduce the public costs of
these. This includes non-welfare approaches to facilitating access
to services, reducing costs and increasing efficiencies, models for
business and institutional structures, and for policy and
investment responses.
Outcome 3: Thriving desert regional
economies
Since Desert Australia is vast and sparsely populated, there is low
critical mass in business activity and in local markets. There is a
Catch-22: individual small businesses cannot reach out to an
external market. More than elsewhere, private investment needs to
be networked, and public investment needs to facilitate this.
Furthermore, there is little capacity across this huge diverse
region – 70% of the continent – to understand what the
future population movements, economic flows, or resource and
cultural limitations could be for different regions. In short, we
do not know enough about the dynamics within and among different
regions. Yet this understanding is critical to public investments
which create thriving regional economies that are much stronger
than the sum of their dispersed and precarious parts.
This informs a single final core project which aims mainly to
understand how individual regions function as a network of
settlements and businesses with movement of people and resources
among them. It also seeks to establish the direction and causes of
population changes and other factors for the whole of desert
Australia (see diagram for these different scales):
CP6: Desert regions as integrated systems aims to facilitate
regional economic development. This includes understanding a desert
region as an integrated system, designing a thriving sustainable
region, and projecting future trajectories of different desert
regions.
